David Braben Kickstarts an Elite Reboot 173
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC report that David Braben has launched a Kickstarter for a remake of Elite, the classic space trading game that he co-wrote in the 1980s. It has already received £122,000 in less than a day."
Going to have a hard time topping modern remakes (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I know the guy did the original and kudos to him for it (I was a huge fan myself of the C64 version, back in the day). But with modern games like X3 [wikipedia.org] and even EVE Online [wikipedia.org], the genre has come a LONG way since the early 80's. It's not going to be enough just to re-skin the original. A modern project like that is a HUGE undertaking. I just hope this guy understands that going in. I would hate to see a remake that couldn't even live up to the many successors it inspired.
Eli-- (Score:4, Insightful)
Without Ian Bell either on the team nor getting credit, count me as disinterested.
Re:Going to have a hard time topping modern remake (Score:1, Insightful)
lolwut? £1.25m ($2m) is nothing for modern AAA game development. The average single platform AAA game costs $10m to make. $2m is predicated on the procedural stuff working, and as Braben admits in the pitch, they've already had some "false starts" on this project. You can bet your ass those false starts revolved around making procedural stuff that doesn't suck. This is an R&D project wrapped up in sheep's clothing. If he makes £1.25m, he's going to blow it. Ask yourself why, with 20 years and a 235-strong development staff, he can't either fund this himself, or get a publisher to do so. The most likely answer is that he's already blown all his opportunities there, by failing at this in the past, and KS is his last resort (and it is - if he blows this, he's never going to get a future Elite funded anywhere).
Spend your KS money on projects that are likely to succeed on their own merits, not on a hope that Braben can somehow pull a fantastic Elite sequel out of his ass for 1/5 of the typical budget for a AAA game when he's already spent 20 years failing to do so.
Re:Going to have a hard time topping modern remake (Score:4, Insightful)
Games are a lot cheaper if you don't hire Hollywood actors to record cut-scene dialogue that I just skip anyway.
Re:Going to have a hard time topping modern remake (Score:4, Insightful)
Ask yourself why, with 20 years and a 235-strong development staff, he can't either fund this himself, or get a publisher to do so.
A developer of Braben's esteem could get publisher funding (as they have done for many other games), but he probably wants to retain creative freedom, which he can do with KS. When you have a publisher funding your project, they call the shots. If they want you to add more blood, explosions, zombies or whatever they think they'd like - it's their call and the studio must do what they're told. If they want it shipping 6 months before it's ready - it's their call. You want to add an innovative, but potentially risky feature? If the publisher isn't convinced, forget it! With KS, I'd say there's much more chance of Frontier shipping a quality game that pushes the boundaries, and won't be ruined by the type of dumbing down that dominates so much of the current crop of publisher-funded games.